I think the exorcism made the problem worse.

(SPOILERS) While
I’ve seen instalments the originaland
III a number of times, until now I
hadn’t got round to checking out the near-universally reviled first Exorcist sequel. Going in, I had lofty
notions Exorcist II: The Heretic would
reveal itself as not nearly the travesty everyone said it was, that it would rather
be deserving of some degree of praise if only it was approached in the right
manner. Well, there is something to
that; as a sequel to The Exorcist, it
sneers at preconceptions right off the bat by wholly failing to terrify, so
making its determined existence within the fabric of that film becomes
downright bizarre (the relationship is almost like Back to the Future Part II to Back
to the Future, but not). Further still, it warrants a twisted validation
for being its own thing, refusing to rehash its predecessor like 90% of sequels,
then and now, thus exerting fascination all its own. Unfortunately, John
Boorman’s film is also equal parts listless and dull, never as torturously
inept and bungled as, say Highlander II:
The Quickening, but bearing all the signs of a lash-up from a studio
desperate to cash in while simultaneously lacking any real idea of how to do
so.

If you
regard The Exorcist as the greatest
movie ever made, it’s perhaps understandable that you’d see its first sequel as
the worst (stand up, Mark Kermode). I
have some sympathy with John Boorman’s reasons for turning down the chance to
direct the original, however. He found the story “rather repulsive”, which is probably why it suited William Friedkin
down to a tee; Friedkin notably referred to Boorman as “a dumb guy” after seeing the sequel, although it’s unclear if this
was before or after his post-Sorcerer
career had fizzled into abject mediocrity. The
Exorcist is a very well-made, very scary movie, but there’s little lasting thematic
resonance to Friedkin’s bag of tricks beyond the capacity to terrorise, and I
can at least appreciate Boorman’s high-minded aims for the sequel, even if he
failed to imbue them. His “metaphysical
thriller” eschewed a return to “torturing
a child” that was the original, and was undoubtedly what audiences were
expecting, instead opting to explore the relationship between good and evil
through the dualistic constructs of religion and science.

William
Goodhart’s screenplay, heavily rewritten by Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg,
picked up on the inspiration for Father Merrin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
(Richard Burton’s Father Lamont even name-checks him at one point), who
balanced the theory of – creative, rather than Darwinian – evolution with his own
religious beliefs, and the concept of the noosphere. The noosphere represents the latest phase in the
development of the Earth, whereby humankind’s consciousness and interaction yields
a transformative effect on the planet. Love would be the ultimate driving force
in this process, leading to a universal Omega Point (the doctrinal Second Coming).

This kind
of flirtation with pseudishness is right up my street – or haunted steps; which
were recreated on a soundstage for The
Heretic as filming permission was denied – as far as movie material goes;
William Peter Blatty notably had greater success integrating overt religious
philosophy in Exorcist III, in spite
of interfering studio edicts. The problems that mangle Exorcist II probably derive from its genesis as a low budget
cash-in that would interview the main players of the original, since this is
retained with Father Lamont (William O’Malley couldn’t return as Father Dyer)
investigating whether Max von Sydow’s Father Merien was a heretic (and indeed, sympathiser
with Old Nick himself). It’s a premise that feeds too overtly on the carcass of
Friedkin’s film, resulting in a picture continually burdened by looking
backwards at its predecessor as it struggles to plough forward with its own
distinct leanings (again, Exorcist III
did a much better job of referencing the history of the series while addressing
its own distinct themes, which, like Heretic,
focus on a man questioning his faith).

It might
have been better to cast aside Linda Blair’s Regan altogether, and so strike
out in an entirely concerted direction. After all, they had von Sydow on board,
and his questionable stature had been placed firmly at the core, and in the
title, of the sequel. As it is, though, The
Heretic comes across as if every element is designed to get the backs up of
fans of the original. There, the core element was the reality of demon
possession; it struck such a chord because it was palpable. It put the fear of
God (or Pazuzu) in audiences.

Now, Linda Blair’s back, the demon child, the
corrupted precious innocent, but she’s refusing to don possession make-up and
her acting deficiencies – possibly coke-fuelled, it would explain the silly
dippy grin she’s wearing throughout – are as foregrounded as her mammaries. On
top of this, the picture takes delivery of a sci-fi gizmo that makes Brainstorm look like cold clinical reality,
as Louise Fletcher’s Dr Tuskin hooks Regan up to a synchronizer by which the
shared mind can allow a connected party to experience the other’s thoughts (and
thus the original’s possession scenes).

I actually
didn’t mind this subplot. It’s such an unabashed distillation of the era’s predilection
for the crossing over of science/ and new age thinking (there’s even spoon
bending on display), but it further ensures any lurking sense of original’s horror
shrinks into the background. Boorman appears to consciously shy away from
anything really spooky; about as chilling as we get is the possessed Regan
coming into view through a distorted mirror effect.

Given that Regan
is now to be the “good locust” (Pazuzu being the demon of the air), a Neo-esque
chosen one who can heal others, the demon wants to destroy her. Likewise, James
Earl Jones’ Kokumo when he was younger; Jones wasn’t even credited at the time
for the iconic work he undertook on another film released in 1977, of course. Regan’s thus retconned as a special person rather than just an average afflicted
pre-teen (so it couldn’t be you, or your family, that got picked on by Pazuzu).

As a consequence, a number of sequences play out on a different plane of
existence. Notably the dual Regan finale, in which Father Lamont is on the receiving
end of anything the Warner Bros special effects department can throw at him.
This is a damp squib, an attempt to compensate for the lack of Regan even being
possessed during the main body of the film. It lacks even the genuine sense of
the surreal found in Lamont’s earlier encounter with Kokumo.

This
sequence, the most engaging in the film (not all that hard, admittedly) finds Father
Lamont seeking out this man. Having called on Pazuzu to show him Kokumo, he
discovers him in the mountain caves where Merrin exorcised him, wearing locust
headgear, only for Lamont to then find
himself speaking to Kokumo the scientist, studying locusts in a lab. It’s an
idea Boorman would return to in a more fully developed form with Percival’s Grail
travails in Excalibur, the vision
quest being one of indefinite materiality. Unfortunately, Heretic rarely manages to coalesce its ideas in such a pleasing
manner. It’s fractured and fragmented, making Pauline Kael’s response surprisingly
positive and almost laudatory:

Kael: The
picture has a visionary crazy grandeur… a swirling, hallucinogenic, apocalyptic
quality… The film is too cadenced and exotic and too deliriously complicated to
succeed with most audiences… There’s enough visual magic in it for a dozen good
movies; what the picture lacks is judgement – the first casualty of the
moviemaking obsession”.

I’d argue
what it lacks more damagingly is narrative propulsion. Boorman leaves the
picture sitting there, apparently incapable of meshing its constituent parts into
a palatable whole. Kael’s completely right regarding the visuals (William A
Fraker also lensed ‘60s classics The President’s
Analyst and Rosemary’s Baby, as
well as 1941 for Spielberg), and the
sequences in Africa are strange, exotic and unknowable, lent the same kind of
mythical lustre Boorman would later bring to Arthurian Britain. Dr Tuskin’s lab
is striking in a different way, a movie-world parlour of windows, reflective
surfaces, and hermetic safety (and dawn rooftops).

Yet the
interactions between Lamont and Tuskin never translate as more than rote. None
of the main performers manage to wrestle the material into something engaging.
Fletcher is curiously passive, and the challenges to science and faith fall
rather flat. Burton definitely isn’t at his best here and, while I wouldn’t get
carried away slating him – as it seems those experiencing his acting here can’t
help but do, amid reports of his drunkenness during the shoot – since his
oversized ham ought to be strangely appropriate to the picture’s portentous
notions, somehow he just flounders.

Mainly,
though, Boorman falters through throwing his grand theme out there (“Does great goodness draw itself to evil?”)
without the clarity to assemble a commanding narrative from it. The locust
footage offers some nice squirmy close ups and swarmy skies, but it isn’t even
really very ominous. Scorsese defended the picture, preferring it to the
original and comparing its main theme to the Book of Job (on those grounds alone, Damon Lindelof probably loves
it). But strong underlining ideas rarely excuse poor delivery. Apparently
Kubrick was offered the picture and believed the only way to do it would be to
make it more graphic and horrific than Friedkin’s. Boorman is to be
congratulated for not doing that – conversely,
Blatty made a movie with some at least as memorable horror moments as the first
film while also leaning against the more overt – but he has failed to synthesise his ideas.

Not in his
hurried post-release re-edits either. Boorman was sick during its making, and
Pallenberg apparently directed key scenes, but his reasons for trimming the
picture were the disastrous audience reactions (reactions did not improve).
About the only roundly admired aspect of the picture is Ennio Morricone’s
score, and even that has its detractors. Kim Newman, often a sense-speaker in
these things, noted that, for all its failings, Exorcist II: The Heretic “does
manage to be very interesting”. I’d certainly agree with that, at least
when its not managing to be dramatically inert. Heretic is both a striking and torpid picture, a combination you’d
find difficult to pull off if you tried.

It was of course, a box office
failure… Well, compared to the original. In today’s money, it made about $120m
in the US, quite respectable. However, not in comparison to the almost $900m made
by Friedkin’s film! Short of Mel Gibson directing a (or another) religious
horror movie, I suspect that’s well out of reach for the genre today. As for
Boorman’s career, some direct scorn at Zardoz,
but that picture knows exactly what
it wants to be. Exorcist II is
probably the only resounding stinker of his career (albeit there have been
other definite failures), but at least it manages to be an interesting stinker.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Vampire Academy (2014) My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on
the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct
Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire
Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if
you added vampires to Heathers, you
would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately
inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from
Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish
leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to
surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young
Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel
storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation
crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like,
hoping…

The Verdict (1982) (SPOILERS) Sidney Lumet’s return to the legal arena, with results every bit as compelling as 12 Angry Men a quarter of a century earlier. This time the focus is on the lawyer, in the form of Paul Newman’s washed-up ambulance chaser Frank Galvin, given a case that finally matters to him. In less capable hands, The Verdict could easily have resorted to a punch-the-air piece of Hollywood cheese, but, thanks to Lumet’s earthy instincts and a sharp, unsentimental screenplay from David Mamet, this redemption tale is one of the genre’s very best.

And it could easily have been otherwise. The Verdict went through several line-ups of writer, director and lead, before reverting to Mamet’s original screenplay. There was Arthur Hiller, who didn’t like the script. Robert Redford, who didn’t like the subsequent Jay Presson Allen script and brought in James Bridges (Redford didn’t like that either). Finally, the producers got the hump with the luxuriantly golden-haired star for meetin…

Darkest Hour (2017)
(SPOILERS) Watching Joe Wright’s return to the rarefied
plane of prestige – and heritage to boot – filmmaking following the execrable
folly of the panned Pan, I was struck
by the difference an engaged director, one who cares about his characters,
makes to material. Only last week, Ridley Scott’s serviceable All the Money in the World made for a pointed
illustration of strong material in the hands of someone with no such
investment, unless they’re androids. Wright’s dedication to a relatable Winston
Churchill ensures that, for the first hour-plus, Darkest Hour is a first-rate affair, a piece of myth-making that barely
puts a foot wrong. It has that much in common with Wright’s earlier Word War II
tale, Atonement. But then, like Atonement, it comes unstuck.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018) (SPOILERS) The cliffhanger sequel, as a phenomenon, is a relatively recent thing. Sure, we kind of saw it with The Empire Strikes Back – one of those "old" movies Peter Parker is so fond of – a consequence of George Lucas deliberately borrowing from the Republic serials of old, but he had no guarantee of being able to complete his trilogy; it was really Back to the Future that began the trend, and promptly drew a line under it for another decade. In more recent years, really starting with The Matrix – The Lord of the Rings stands apart as, post-Weinstein's involvement, fashioned that way from the ground up – shooting the second and third instalments back-to-back has become a thing, both more cost effective and ensuring audiences don’t have to endure an interminable wait for their anticipation to be sated. The flipside of not taking this path is an Allegiant, where greed gets the better of a studio (split a novel into two movie parts assuming a…

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) (SPOILERS) The belated arrival of the Ant-Man sequel on UK shores may have been legitimately down to World Cup programming, but it nevertheless adds to the sense that this is the inessential little sibling of the MCU, not really expected to challenge the grosses of a Doctor Strange, let alone the gargantuan takes of its two predecessors this year. Empire magazine ran with this diminution, expressing disappointment that it was "comparatively minor and light-hitting" and "lacks the scale and ambition of recent Marvel entries". Far from deficits, for my money these should be regard as accolades bestowed upon Ant-Man and the Wasp; it understands exactly the zone its operating in, yielding greater dividends than the three most recent prior Marvel entries the review cites in its efforts at point scoring.

The Avengers 5.12: The Superlative Seven I’ve always rather liked this one, basic as it is in premise. If the title consciously evokes The Magnificent Seven, to flippant effect, the content is Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, but played out with titans of their respective crafts – including John Steed, naturally – encountering diminishing returns. It also boasts a cast of soon-to-be-famous types (Charlotte Rampling, Brian Blessed, Donald Sutherland), and the return of one John Hollis (2.16: Warlock, 4.7: The Cybernauts). Kanwitch ROCKS!

The Falcon and the Snowman (1985)
(SPOILERS) I suspect, if I hadn’t been ignorant of the story of Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee selling secrets to the Soviets during the ‘70s, I’d have found The Falcon and the Snowman less engaging than I did. Which is to say that John Schlesinger’s film has all the right ingredients to be riveting, including a particularly camera-hogging performance from Sean Penn (as Lee), but it’s curiously lacking in narrative drive. Only fitfully does it channel the motives of its protagonists and their ensuing paranoia. As such, the movie makes a decent primer on the case, but I ended up wondering if it might not be ideal fodder for retelling as a miniseries.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) Along with Pain &
Gain and The Great Gatsby, The Wolf of Wall Street might be viewed
as the completion of a loose 2013 trilogy on the subject of success and excess;
the American Dream gone awry. It’s the superior picture to its fellows, by
turns enthralling, absurd, outrageous and hilarious. This is the fieriest, most
deliriously vibrant picture from the director since the millennium turned.
Nevertheless, stood in the company of Goodfellas,
the Martin Scorsese film from which The
Wolf of Wall Street consciously takes many of its cues, it is found wanting.

I was vaguely familiar with the title, not because I knew
much about Jordan Belfort but because the script had been in development for such
a long time (Ridley Scott was attached at one time). So part of the pleasure of
the film is discovering how widely the story diverges from the Wall Street template. “The Wolf of Wall
Street” suggests one who towers over the city like a behemoth, rather than a
guy …

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) (SPOILERS) Avengers: Age
of Ultron’s problem isn’t one of lack. It benefits from a solid central
plot. It features a host of standout scenes and set pieces. It hands (most of)
its characters strong defining moments. It doesn’t even suffer now the “wow”
factor of seeing the team together for the first time has subsided. Its problem
is that it’s too encumbered. Maybe its asking to much of a director to
effectively martial the many different elements required by an ensemble
superhero movie such as this, yet Joss Whedon’s predecessor feels positively
lean in comparison.

Part of this is simply down to the demands of the vaster
Marvel franchise machine. Seeds are laid for Captain America: Civil War, Infinity
Wars I & II, Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok. It feels like several spinning plates too many. Such
activity occasionally became over-intrusive on previous occasions (Iron Man II), but there are points in Age of Ultron where it becomes
distractingly so. …

The Avengers 5.11: Epic Epic has something of a Marmite reputation, and even as someone who rather likes it, I can quite see its flaws. A budget-conscious Brian Clemens was inspired to utilise readily-available Elstree sets, props and costumes, the results both pushing the show’s ever burgeoning self-reflexive agenda and providing a much more effective (and amusing) "Avengers girl ensnared by villains attempting to do for her" plot than The House That Jack Built, Don't Look Behind You and the subsequent The Joker. Where it falters is in being little more than a succession of skits and outfit changes for Peter Wyngarde. While that's very nearly enough, it needs that something extra to reach true greatness. Or epic-ness.